In the overall grand scheme of things what do I want this project to do?

Well for too long IoT has been a buzzword that means "This thing is now connected to your phone". That's not in the spirit of what a smart home or an IoT home should be. A truly connected home means that there is a conglomeration of data in your home where you bring data together in meaningful ways.

My plan is to build IOTA. The epicenter of data. Somewhat like a local IFTTT. I have seen openHab but that is not what I'm looking for. What I want is something that can make components out of the various IoT devices out there and have them trigger events and respond to inputs in a simple way.

I am thinking of a block based event constructor like scratch that's written in my favorite scripting language, Lua. The UI will be extensible. I'm using some closed source software for the UI that I cannot release however I can release the Lua source for my project as well as all the project files. I will have to work out a way to add ui elements via Lua in the future to get others input but as it stands it should be something pretty neat in it's own right.

The main idea is that if there is an open API for the IoT device, we can write a translation layer for IOTA where we extend the block level event I/O